The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe Read Free

place where Mr Grant was born – we each yelped
our first notes in the land of midges. The main thing about
Mr Higgens was his capacity for listening. We could all talk,
after a fashion, and I suppose the Bloomsbury habit was for the
endlessly characterful business of talk, a modern version of the
classical love of rhetoric. Talking was a thing I took very much
for granted, as all animals do, but the vital talent was the one
for cocking an ear. Walter Higgens listened to everything and
he said little: that was my initial inheritance, on the long drive
through the mountains, lowlands, and smoky shires. I sat up and looked at Mrs Higgens. I moved my head in the
way they liked, and she clapped my coat and stroked my face.
She pressed her lips together as she tried to open an old tea
tin. ‘Mrs Gurdin told me this morning she comes to Europe
a lot of the time, and she always arranges to take dogs from
England. She finds lovely homes for them in California.’ Mrs
Higgens, as she spoke, was looking at me with a brand of selfpity, the kind that imagines other people’s lives are always
more exciting than their own. She finally got the tin open
and took out a collar that smelt immediately of leather that
had spent many long hours out in the rain. ‘Walter used to
look after the dogs,’ said Mrs Higgens, ‘the ones at Rodmell
as well, and this was Pinker’s collar. You don’t inherit much
in this family. Mr Grant is seventy-five. We’re not that kind
of family. But Vita gave this to Mrs Woolf’s dog and now I’m
giving it to you.’ She made the collar small, taking it down
several notches. Then she fastened it around my neck with
the great ceremony that English people reserve for moments
of minor sentiment, and I was immediately glad to have its
story with me.
    * As a diarist, Mrs Higgens was a minimalist. Feb. 5: ‘Bought cream buns with real cream.’
* The whole family was kind to dogs. In the first surviving letter written in his own hand, RLS makes affectionate mention of his dog, Coolin. Three years later he is still thinking of the dog when writing to his mother from boarding school: ‘I hope that Coolin is all well and that he will send me another letter.’
* He liked novelists who got out of doors. Defoe, Smollett, Orwell. He said novelists who didn’t like adventure should take up knitting.

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    s the man said, the truth is seldom plain and never simple, but this comes pretty close. Mrs Gurdin took me to London for a night at the Savoy then put me on a Pan-American flight to Los Angeles. With a group of other dogs I was placed in an existential vacuum called ‘the hold’. We were then put in quarantine at a new facility somewhere in Griffith Park, close enough to the zoo for us to hear the wazooms of the elephants. Years later, when I thought of this time I would recall how Sigmund Freud, on coming to London, had pined for one of his beloved chows, Lun, who was quarantined in Ladbroke Grove while the great doctor was being lionised in Hampstead. In that prison in Los Angeles, I yearned for someone to own me and miss me. I was no horse: I loved the idea of being owned, because, for a dog, ownership sets you free. I wanted someone to love me and I didn’t yet know her name.
    ‘Mason, Tommy. Look how cute. This is definitely the one I would take home. The little white one? Sir, can we buy him?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the jailer. (It was always him. The crunch of his boots on the gravel was familiar. The whiff of cologne. They were heavy boots. It was heavy cologne.) We were outside, in a little fenced-off area. ‘These dogs are not for sale. They are in these cages for a reason. The zoo is that way.’ ‘You can buy things at the zoo?’
‘No. You want a pet store? Los Feliz is that way.’
Apart from his genius in the arts of imprisonment, the jailer made a strong impression with his love of stars and planets, which he talked about incessantly while feeding the dogs.